Chicago’s queer Black and Brown artists have long carved out spaces for gathering, mutual support, and creative experimentation despite the persistent challenges of sustaining such sites over time. From the “Black & Tan” establishments that animated 1940s–50s Washington Park and Woodlawn, to The Warehouse of the late 1970s and ballroom scenes in South Shore high-rises of the 1980s, queer artist communities have continually innovated new models of space-making for each generation.
Essex Hemphill & Wayson Jones | Photo Credit: Daniel Cima Image from FIERCENESS SERVED! The Story of the Legendary ENIKAlley Coffeehouse in DC on prideindex.com
Ad for The Warehouse in the Rockland Journal-News, August 7 1998
Across the 1980s and 1990s, queer-centered venues nationwide fueled a broader cultural movement by dedicating space to support Black LGBTQ+ artists such as Audre Lorde and Essex Hemphill in D.C.’s Enikally Café, and Simone Bouyer, Robert Ford, and Frankie Knuckles in Chicago spaces like Wholesome Roc Gallery. By the early 2000s, many of these small but vital venues had disappeared. Yet a new generation of queer Black and Brown artists and space-makers continues to design inventive ways to assemble.
Through site visits, salon-style gatherings, community mixers, performances, exhibitions, poetry, photography, and film, Never So Free: Queer Black Arts + Assembly in Chicago honors this local lineage of queer Black space-making. The project affirms the importance of dedicated space for collaborative art practice, creates multidisciplinary platforms for experimentation, and provides documentation of these spaces and the artists who build and thrive in them.
Never So Free also extends this work by offering the Green Line Performing Arts Center at Arts + Public Life as a contemporary site of assembly—an intentional home for queer Black artists seeking a supportive environment to develop and share new work.
Grounded in artist-led gatherings and archival contributions, Never So Free operates as a practice of cultural stewardship: honoring the past, sustaining the present, and building pathways for future generations to thrive.
Frankie Knuckles and guests at Think Ink magazine’s reception
Wholesome Roc Gallery & Cafe, 1987
2025
In 2025, the network of queer Black and Brown artists and spaces continued to expand through the second iteration of the project, Lineages: Never So Free.
Throughout the year, Lineages: Never So Free gathered artists, culture workers, and community convenors through curated experiences centered on Black and Brown creative space-making and queer cultural life on the South Side of Chicago. A bus tour, artist and spacemaker mixer, and expansion of the video profile series continued to strengthen the ties between today’s Black and Brown queer artists and Chicago’s long lineage of queer art-making and cultural innovation.
Click description to jump to section
photo by Jaclyn Rivas
Lineages: Never So Free continues to strengthen the ties between today’s Black and brown queer artists and Chicago’s long lineage of queer art-making and cultural innovation. More than a series of events, Never So Free is a practice of cultural stewardship that honors the past, supports the present, and builds pathways for future generations to thrive.
December 12: Never So Free Artist + Space Mixer
This happy hour gathered the people who build queer culture on the South Side for an evening shaped by the rhythm of Chicago’s Black and Brown queer creative life. Artists, curators, space-makers, DJs, and culture workers came together to connect and celebrate the rich lineage of queer arts sites, the current landscape of creative spaces, and the future destinations being imagined in real time.
Chicago powerhouse Anna DeShawn led the game lounge, soulful sounds were provided by Manasseh, and DJ CQQCHIFRUIT kept the night moving on the decks.
Part social mixer and part creative recharge, the event extended the Never So Free project’s mission of honoring the legacy and future of Black and Brown queer art and assembly on the South Side.
photos by Anjali Pinto
October 25: Bus Tour
Artists and space-makers hopped on a bus for a unique tour of Chicago’s historic and contemporary queer Black arts spaces, led by tour guides Isis Ferguson and Duane Powell, with destinations including the Jamii Center for Arts & Media, The House of the Lorde, Sisters in Cinema Media Center and the TeaHouse Collective. Travelers experienced a rare glimpse of Frankie Knuckles’ first Chicago apartment—an early gathering place for the emerging House music scene in South Shore.
Offerings
In 2025, the Never So Free Program gathered artists, culture workers, and community builders through curated experiences centered on Black and Brown creative space-making and queer cultural life on the South Side of Chicago.
photos by Jaclyn Rivas
video edited by Moll Nye
photos by Anjali Pinto
Artist Profiles
Jenn Freeman/Po’Chop
Roy Kinsey
Adam McMath
Duane Powell
Chicago’s cultural landscape is rich and expansive. Delve into footage of Never So Free artists and learn more about their practices, inspirations and the spaces that feed their creativity.
Emeka Ekwelum
Peter Gaona
Fabulous Freddie Leroy
Shanta Nurullah and Zarah Baker
Donna Rose Weams
2024
In 2024, Black and Brown queer artists from a range of disciplines came together to explore the history, present, and future of Black queer art-making spaces in Chicago. By listening to and learning from those who have shaped and sustained these spaces, they built a vibrant community and embraced the imperative that collective dreaming can sustain artistic vision and fuel persistence.
The series culminated in opportunities to turn outward, expanding the community of Black and Brown queer Chicago artists through the intentional transformation of the Green Line Performing Arts Center into a queer, artist-led gathering space. The cohort created three public offerings in the venue, culminating in Dream House, a multi-room, multi-sensory experience of Black and Brown queer joy, rest, and rejuvenation.
Throughout the year, Never So Free: Black Queer Art + Assembly in Chicago sparked powerful new connections and relationships across the South Side’s queer creative ecosystem. As one participant shared, “the most powerful part of this experience is dreaming about what comes next—more spaces for Black queer artists across disciplines to gather, imagine, and create.”
Click description to jump to section
Never So Free Highlight Reel
All videos shot and edited by Elizabeth Myles
Never So Free
2024 Artists
Click the photo to view the bio
For viewing on the phone, click the small dot on the lower right of the photo to view the details
Offerings
In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D. G. Kelley writes, “Knowing the color of the sky is far more important than counting clouds. Or to put it another way, the most radical art is not protest art but works that take us to another place, envision a new way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling.”
This is no easy feat in a culture that purposefully limits imagination. To move into a new way of seeing and a different way of feeling, we must first confront the Dream Thief.
-Kemi Alabi
Drawing from the exploration of lost, current, and liminal spaces paired with the spaces we have and create for dreaming, the three offerings of the Never So Free: Black Queer Art + Assembly artist series delve deeper into the dream space, exploring the different perspectives of and energies that encompass dreaming. The series invites intentional community building and expansion to emphasize the political imperative of dreaming and imagination to our collective liberation, especially during this fraught political and cultural moment.
October 24, 2024: Dream Soirée
An intimate dinner party and creative activation, where elements of West African ritual practice will guide our community through care and intentional offerings. What’s the artist’s role in this political moment? As fear takes hold, how do we recommit to care, connection, and dreaming without limit? Join us for our Dream Soirée, a space to reclaim our radical imaginations. Harness the power of word and movement play with Kemi Alabi and Benji Hart, then set intentions with a dinner ritual led by Alexandra Antoine
photos by Never So Free Cohort
November 14, 2024: Club Dream
A high vibe night of movement and sound to free your mind and let your body follow, Club Dream is a space to embody our radical imaginations. Find liberation through experimentation with movement and style, with offerings by photographer Natasha Moustache, DJ Duane Powell, vogue instructor Fabulous Freddie, and drag guide Po ’Chop.
photos by Natasha Moustache
December 6, 2024: The Dream House
A multi-sensory experience of Black queer joy, rest, and rejuvenation, transforming the Green Line Performing Arts Center into a queer, artist-led space to dream. We breathe into our radical imaginations and reflect out to our creative communities through a series of collective acts and independent explorations. Find your breath and voice with pop star THAIR. Center tranquility and tenderness through INDIA MARTIN's visual history of queer art making and family formation. Hear and record your own stories of motherhood at CAI THOMAS's listening station and recording studio. Free your body with FABULOUS FREDDIE's famous vogue immersion experience. Feel it in your bones with DJ RAE CHARDONNAY's dreamy set.
photos by Lyric Newbern
Artist Profiles
Chicago’s cultural landscape is rich and expansive. Delve into footage of Never So Free artists and learn more about their practices, inspirations and the spaces that feed their creativity.
Kemi Alabi
Alexandra Antoine
Benji Hart
India Martin
Natasha Moustache
Thair
cai thomas
Background
In 1987, Wholesome Roc Gallery opened in Chicago as an alternative art space organized with and for Chicago’s queer Black artists, among them Simone Bouyer, Robert Ford and Frankie Knuckles. Along with Washington DC’s Enikalley Coffeehouse, home to artists Audre Lorde and Essex Hemphill, queer-centered spaces around the country launched a cultural movement by dedicating space for Black LGBTQ+ artists. Unfortunately, most of these small spaces closed in the 90s as the neighborhoods became less affordable. Today, Black queer space-makers in Chicago (i.e., House of the Lorde, AfroDisco Social Hour, froSkate, ) have carved out temporary places and intermittent pop-up scenes.
Last summer, APL collaborated with Sisters in Cinema and Party Noire to present Fierceness Served: Creating Black Queer Cultural Space, an evening of film, conversation, and social activation. The standing-room-only crowd joined in a lively conversation with six cultural leaders representing queer Black space-makers from the 1980s to today. Never So Free expands on the insights, themes and format of Fierceness Served.
Beginning in the spring of 2024, a cohort of queer Black artists from various disciplines gathered to establish community and creative connection, to meet with guest artists, archivists and place-makers drawn from Chicago’s queer Black creative communities, and to visit sites of significance within Chicago’s queer Black art making landscapes. In the fall, they collaborated a series of offerings that broaden the invitation to join a multi-generational conversation among queer Black and brown artists, their communities and their histories, to explore the rich history of queer Black space making in Chicago, and to affirm the significance of dedicated creative space for collaborative art making.
Throughout the year, APL’s Green Line Performing Arts Center served as a sustained space for queer Black artists to gather and develop their community and craft. Never So Free serves as a pilot for an ongoing effort to offer GLPAC as a site of assembly and creativity for a new generation of queer Black artists seeking a supportive place to make work.
Guest Artists and Partners
Salon 2: Current Spaces
Sisters in Cinema | Yvonne Welbon and Samira Abderahman
Black Alphabet | Adam L. McMath and Joshua X. Miller
froSkate | L Brew
AfroDisco Social Hour | Nnaemeka Ekwelum
Greystone Collective | Clemenstien Love
Salon 3: Liminal Spaces
Intention Setting | Faylita Hicks
Open Television (OTV) | Chris Walker and Sarah Minnie
House of the Lorde | Tiff Beatty and Jenn Freeman
NSF Orientation
Intention Setting | Samantha Jo
Literary Exchange | Donna Rose
EMERGENCE: Intersections at the Center, South Side Community Art Center | LaMar Gayles
Salon 1: Lost Spaces
Intention Setting | Rhonda Wheatley
AMFM | Ciera McKissick
Queer History of the Warehouse | Duane Powell
Wholesome Roc | [Media Burn and Stephanie Coleman video ]
For details, contact the Never So Free Team at isisf@uchicago.edu
Never So Free: Black Queer Art + Assembly is funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Arts + Public Life is honored to be a part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.